Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. Protecting information is often part of a routine process that is performed within an organization.
A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by each of its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth.
Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, in addition to protecting data. For instance, companies often implement migration techniques for moving data to lower cost storage over time and data reduction techniques for reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc.
Enterprises also increasingly view their stored data as a valuable asset. Along these lines, customers are looking for solutions that not only protect and manage, but also leverage their data. For instance, solutions providing data analysis capabilities, improved data presentation and access features, and the like, are in increasing demand.
In addition to backing up files, a company might also archive files to comply with reporting and legal requirements. IT departments within a company may also generate reports of storage systems to identify usage and trending details. Such reports can be used to determine if additional storage is needed, etc.
Often data in a primary storage device is scanned multiple times by a storage management system to identify different pieces of information regarding the usage of the primary storage device and the files stored thereon. For example, a primary storage device is often scanned a first time to identify the files that should be backed up according to a backup storage policy. Following the first scan, the storage management system can perform a backup of the identified files. At a later point in time, the data in the primary storage device is then scanned a second time to identify any files that should be archived. Following the second scan, the storage management system archives the identified files. The primary storage device can be scanned a third time to identify usage information or other information not collected during the backup or the archive scans, such as the amount of used storage space vs. available storage space, the number of mount points, the number of volumes, types of disks used for storage, disk trending, fault trending, etc. Following the third scan, the storage management system can generate various reports based on the usage information, such as the rate at which storage space is being used, etc.
The backup, archive, and reporting operations can be very time consuming, as each operation scans the storage system for different information. Further, the amount of time needed to complete the various scans and operations can exceed the time allocated by a system administrator.